Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (8 page)

Then for some days, there was radio silence. My grandmother could not stand the suspense so she took matters into her own hands. She must have liked him in that first meeting, because she boldly wrote a letter to my grandfather. He was taking too long to decide. “If we don’t get married I have to go back soon to Delhi to my job, or I will lose it,” my grandma wrote. “So make up your mind either way.” My grandfather, who was at that time touring the south for work, came back to Tanjore and visited my grandmother again without his daughter. He spoke to her father, went to the jeweler’s that night for the
thali,
or ceremonial wedding necklace, and
asked a local shopkeeper to open a store after hours so he could buy her a wedding sari. The very next morning they got hitched.

Love and passion begat marriage in my world. Yet in my grandparents’ world, marriage began with practicality. My grandfather told me proudly of that day he first met my grandmother. He interviewed her, posing little riddles to test her common sense. “Supposing you have to take the children to school and you’re late and it’s supposed to rain,” he said. “Would you take a taxi or a bus?” My grandmother said, “Well, first I’d take an umbrella.” Ice cream in Central Park, this was not.

With quiet resolve and great political skill she navigated her new household, which was already populated by three children, two boys and the brooding teenager that was my mom at sixteen. Raji managed to feed them all as well as her own daughter, Neela, who came on the scene in 1963. She maintained her bright demeanor even when the number of mouths grew to ten, including grandchildren and daughters-in-law, by 1977, and when on weekday mornings four girls were still naked and late for the school bus and two men did not yet have their lunches packed.

After my grandfather retired from government service, he moved the family from New Delhi to Madras. I had always assumed my grandmother was happy to be down south again; years later I learned she actually preferred the north, with its milder climate and more modern ways. But as with so much of life, she had little choice. No one ever asked her what she wanted. She existed where life had taken her, and she chose to get on with it. From the start, my grandmother did not expect love, though she came to be loved deeply and respected by her husband. She returned his affection in her own ways, though she still slept best alone on the marble floor of the bedroom without a mattress or blanket. In fact, because of the heat, she relished getting all her work done and napping in the afternoon on the floor in her bedroom, alone. Neela and I occupied the space below their bed at night, so afternoons were the only time she had to herself.
Our family home did not ever have air-conditioning and the marble floor was the coolest place to sleep, especially in the pre-monsoon heat. When my husband and I got engaged, I brought him home to meet my folks in India. His upbringing in an upper-class Muslim family in Bombay had been much more privileged than what we were used to down south. I was afraid the heat would be too much for him. He was a sweater to boot. I had air-conditioning put in the other bedroom, with my grandfather complaining the whole way about the electric bills. Since then, during visits we’ve all congregated in the one room with air-conditioning, leaving my grandmother to enjoy, finally, the solace of her cool marble floor anytime she wants peace.

Raji did not expect happiness, though she could pluck from deep within the appreciation of simply being fed, clothed, sheltered, and regarded. I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: “I mean, are you happy
with your life,
Rajima?” “I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably, as if she’d never really considered such a question. “When there is little you can do, you do what you can.” Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could.

I thought of her counsel as I sat on the floor of my room in the Sorry Hotel.
Just do one thing,
I told myself,
complete one task.
I crawled through the cardboard labyrinth, collecting as many kumquats as I could in a floppy green hat I grabbed from a half-emptied box, gathering the brim around the fruit like a beggar’s pouch. In the hotel room’s kitchenette, I peered into the fridge, which I had stocked when I arrived but hadn’t so much
as opened for days. Rummaging through the produce drawer, I pulled out some green chilies, a knob of ginger, and a few bags of leaves and seeds from an Indian market. I knew one thing I could do. I had a deadline from
Gourmet
magazine hanging over me, which, in my stupor, I had willfully ignored. At the time I cursed myself for signing up to do a holiday-gifting story that entailed recipes for chutneys and pickles. But God bless the kitchen saint Ruth Reichl, the magazine’s editor, for unwittingly helping to get me off my ass, and my mother for sending those kumquats.

If I could at least make a big batch of some sauce, some condiment, then it would do two kinds of work for me. I could meet my professional obligation, and I could use that sauce to bring
some
sunshine back into my life. I could lift myself, at least gastronomically, from the gray. I could turn that hatful of dusty citrus into something golden. And indeed, the kumquat chutney I ended up making is what woke me up in a sense. I’m certain that in large part, it had to do with the fact that my grandmother used to make a similar tangerine peel chutney I loved when growing up. I could use the fruits my mother gifted me, in my grandmother’s recipe, as a potent antidote to my sense of being adrift, lost at sea, unmoored. I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.

When I was growing up, fresh fruit was expensive for us. My grandmother was allowed to buy fruit only when my grandfather was feeling flush. During mango season, she would occasionally hand out pits after she’d carved the fruits and I’d suck those pits for half an hour, trying to get every last bit of flesh.

When we visited other people’s homes we often took a small basket of bananas, apples, or pomegranates as gifts the way Westerners might bring a bottle of wine. My grandfather would occasionally spring for fruit when a religious ceremony, or
puja,
took place in our home. But in general, he
thought fruit a frivolous luxury. In fact, even on religious holidays, when we needed a
prasadam,
or offering, he preferred a liquidy, sweet rice or noodle pudding called
payasam.
Fruit was expensive, but the milk and sugar for
payasam
could be purchased with our ration cards.

I often thought that Rajima’s vociferous haggling with the poor spindly-legged fruit and vegetable vendor each morning was for my grandfather’s benefit. Whatever the reason, she was good at it. By the time she finally bought a handful of small, sweet tangerines, she had weaseled her way into a free handful of green chilies and a knob of ginger. She always left with a few tangled branches of curry leaves, for which she never paid or haggled. That sweet fool gave them without fuss with every purchase, just for the pleasure of her daily verbal thrashing, as predictable as the noon heat and as welcome as a cold shower.

My grandmother cooked every meal fresh, not only because she believed it produced healthier and tastier food but also because she didn’t grow up with the luxury of a fridge. In fact, she never had one until her thirties. Even after the fridge came, her routine didn’t change. She didn’t know any other way. Having so many mouths to feed meant she was almost always cooking. She made the chutney with cast-off peels along with whatever ginger, chilies, and curry leaves hadn’t been used up for the evening meal. I yearned for this chutney far more than for the sweet fruit. While everyone else quietly ate their stir-fried curries and soupy lentils ladled over rice, I fixed my attention on a bowl of white rice mixed with sour homemade plain yogurt and a heap of that exquisite chutney. Rajima, or Jima as we often called her, turned a blind eye to my selfish hoarding of the chutney, because no one else moaned over it with sufficient ecstasy. My young palate was Jima’s best audience.

Back in that hotel room, thirty years later, I made a big batch of kumquat chutney. To generate the recipe, I used a ton of freshly chopped ginger and hot green chilies and simplified the spices, mostly because I didn’t
have them all on hand. But it worked. I spooned a bit into my mouth, the fresh chilies and tart citrus jolting my palate free from stupor. Soon I found myself at the market again, buying pearly scallops, heaving fennel bulbs and sweet potatoes into my basket. I also bought goat cheese and butter, hoping to put some weight back on. I savored that first marigold-hued, glazy dollop, and thought of all the things I could do with this golden chutney.

What I did with those kumquats became a strategy I call upon whenever I want to eat well but can’t for reasons of time, weakness, or inertia. As soon as I can conjure the energy, I make up a big batch of some flavorful sauce, a sort of “mother sauce,” shall we say, and use it throughout the week by the tablespoon or cup to give life to simple food. The French have masterfully used sauces as the base to make their dishes for centuries. They have hundreds, many created—or consolidated, anyway—by the early-nineteenth-century chef Antonin Carême. Then those were whittled down by the great Auguste Escoffier into what we now know as the five mother sauces of French cuisine. It’s funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, it’s largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct way of doing things. It’s funny how these old European men used a label like “mother sauce” when there were no women to be found anywhere near those old professional kitchens. Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.
My
version of a mother sauce actually comes from my foremothers, from the fruits of my mother’s garden, and is based on a recipe handed down from my grandmother. I have always associated cooking with womanhood. At that moment, in August 2007, when I did not feel so womanly, with my insides carved out and my marriage a failure, the only thing I could take pleasure in was that golden sauce.

M
aybe that old adage about not
being able to have a good apartment, a good relationship, and a good job at the same time is true. I had been living at the Sorry Hotel for several months. I had no relationship, but I was thankful for my job on
Top Chef
. Indeed, because the show filmed in a different location every season, we basically moved to that town for those weeks and set up camp like gypsies. So this scenario was a blessing in disguise, because at least for those weeks my hotel expenses would be covered. I put most of my belongings in storage and went to Chicago for my third season. At the time, I wasn’t making enough to live on from the show alone, but I was making ends meet (barely) by piecing together the writing, the book advance, and, believe it or not, still the occasional modeling gig. On bad days, which were many, I felt lost and displaced, like when I first moved back to the States from Italy at the end of my twenties—except scarier, because now I had just turned thirty-seven. On good days, which were few, I felt the same as when I was a young model in Europe just after college. I didn’t know what the future held in store for me, but I felt hopeful. My second cookbook was being published and I had recently secured a two-year contract with Pantene.

Top Chef
was really starting to take hold in popular culture. My job meant a whole new world was revealed to me—besides learning restaurant techniques and terminology, I had the opportunity to meet incredible chefs, like Daniel Boulud and Wylie Dufresne, and also to share meals with them. I got to talk shop all day long, to gush adjectives when describing a course of food the way tennis fans might describe a stunning serve, the way I used to coo over Dior and Yves Saint Laurent.

I ate my excitement. I was a puppy dog, wide-eyed and eager, so thrilled to be at the table that I overdid it. Here were these talented professional cooks vying to outdo one another, wielding racks of lamb and pork belly and cream—ingredients designed to make food as lush and rich and irresistible as possible. This was food I would never dream of making at home. I was, and still am, an enthusiastic home cook. Nothing special, just someone who hopes that guests will like my lentil recipes. These chefs cooked with liquid nitrogen, duck fat, and sous-vide. I got to eat it all beside our head judge, Tom Colicchio, and Eric Ripert, and knew I had a chance to learn from these culinary giants. I’d take a bite of sweetbreads or escolar and timidly express my ambivalence. Tom would dub it exceptional and ask me why I didn’t like it. Eric would disagree with Tom, and they’d discuss the finer points of searing, poaching, and seasoning. And I was left eager to understand why they knew it was improperly cooked by what they were tasting, and why I didn’t. I would taste the dish again as they play-fought. And then again. That became a pattern with me: when in doubt, I took another bite.

While part of my overindulgence came from my lack of experience, the rest came from self-doubt. I’ve always been intent on proving that I wasn’t just a five-foot-niner plucked at random from the catwalk. I had, or at least I thought I had, some credibility. I’d written two cookbooks and had hosted food documentaries and a cooking show on the Food Network. But still I worried. I had more than a touch of imposter syndrome. Tom
had proven his chops cooking for great chefs and heading up more than a couple of restaurants that were well respected in New York. Gail had gone to culinary school and worked as an assistant to Daniel Boulud and to Jeffrey Steingarten before joining
Food & Wine
magazine. Our show was the sister show to
Project Runway,
and it made sense that a model hosted a show on fashion. But I didn’t want people to think that Bravo had just put another model into the same format for their new food competition show.

I got looks at first from a few of the guest judges who didn’t know me at all—most of them accomplished chefs—that virtually screamed, “Why the hell are
you
here?” I felt they thought I was nothing more than a pretty face. And ever since my first cookbook came out, I’d heard the tired complaint: What does a model know about eating? So as soon as the food came out, I ate like I had something to prove. I ate to the point of discomfort. Sure, I hadn’t broken down a side of beef or cooked on the line. But I’d eaten and learned about good food all over the world—the finest
bastillas
in Marrakesh, tons of meals in Paris bistros, fresh pasta made by expert hands in Milan, the best
biryani
in Hyderabad, and the most exhilarating
chaat
in Delhi.

My love for food was born in India, where I spent the first four years of my life and many summers afterward. The vivid flavors I experienced there will forever be the standard to which I hold any food I eat today. Perhaps my most formative food experiences happened when my mother sent me back to Madras to study for the year. It was also during this time that my mother was divorced by my stepfather V., because he did not believe what she and I had told him about what happened to me in my bed.

When I arrived in Madras I immediately entered third grade (or “standard,” as it’s known there) at St. Michael’s Academy, the new local Catholic school, in the middle of the school year. It was an English medium school but students were required to study a second Indian language from kindergarten on. I spoke Tamil more or less as well as my peers, but
because I’d left India at age four, I couldn’t read or write it. However, I would have been behind my classmates regardless, because the Indian elementary school system is far ahead of the American. Worst of all, I would have no summer break and I would be the new girl yet again.

Moving between India and the States brought changes that left me perpetually confused and feeling like an outsider. For one, I couldn’t keep my spellings straight—in the U.S. I’d write “colour” and “flavour,” and in India, “color” and “flavor.” Then there were more embarrassing cultural mix-ups. In the U.S., wearing a tank top to deal with heat was perfectly normal, but the same outfit in India came off as wildly provocative, drawing snickers from my cousins and
tut-tut
s from my uncles. Deeper than that, I was always missing some important event of pop culture or rite of passage that my peers had experienced, because I was in the wrong country. I didn’t wholly identify with the collective experiences of children in either place. I had one foot in each culture, but no firm footing in either of them.

At the time, the school consisted of just a few square rooms topped with thatched roofs, standing in a dusty courtyard surrounded by neem trees. It was in the Adyar neighborhood, near the Aavin Milk Bar, a major landmark in seventies Madras, where so many families took their kids for shakes or sticks of frozen milk. Located at the intersection of five roads, the Milk Bar was a round compound and was shaded by trees, providing lovers a safe place to furtively meet camouflaged by swarms of friends. It was also a place where young families could enjoy an inexpensive outing in the cool evening air. We always passed it on the way home from school and looked longingly at it like some sweet oasis.

Around 3:45 p.m. every weekday afternoon, the St. Michael’s school bus spit me out, along with my cousin Rajni, below our little flat, always teeming with activity. In one room lived Rajni and her parents: my mother’s younger brother Vichu and his wife, my aunt Bhanu. Once when I was
three I tried to kill Rajni by stepping on her. Soon to arrive on the scene was her brother, Rohit, my main rival for my grandfather’s affection. In the second bedroom were my two grandparents, me, and Neela, my mother’s youngest sibling. As if that weren’t enough, my cousin Aarti, my uncle Ravi’s daughter, often came from Delhi to stay with us, too, as did Neela’s cousin Vidya, the daughter of one of my grandmother’s brothers. Add to that my grandfather’s students, who, hoping to raise their exam scores, would loiter in the living room hall on Sundays. Needless to say, the time spent in my grandfather’s flat stood in stark contrast to my life as a latchkey kid in the crowded metropolis of New York City.

Rajni and I arrived at a rare time of quiet in an otherwise bustling home. My grandparents were usually napping in their room. Once we washed our hands and feet and had a snack, we were encouraged to nap, too, at least until the sun sank and the temperature dipped. Whether we napped or not, we weren’t allowed to go out in the sun until after 4:30 p.m. My grandmother thought we were already too dark from playing sports outside during school. You had only to read the matrimonial columns to see that light-skinned girls had it easier, even in a brown country like India. Indian culture was rife with color prejudice. Often the first word on the listing boasting of the eligible boy or girl for marriage would be “fair.” “Wheatish” was used when they couldn’t get away with saying “fair,” and no one wanted to be called the euphemistic “dusky.” Our time playing outside during those summers was brief. We had only a couple of hours after 5:00 p.m. tiffin—the subcontinent’s version of its colonizers’ “tea,” which brought
dosa
and
kachori
rather than cucumber sandwiches—to play fox hunt or a violent game of tag. Sometimes we’d build sand temples adorned with red and white hibiscus flowers, before darkness when the mosquitoes became too menacing.

The nights were so hot that most adults congregated on their verandas, keeping an eye on us as we played. The sounds of our neighbors’ lives
blared through the neighborhood or colony almost as loudly as the TVs (which we ourselves only acquired in 1977). From our spots in the sand, we’d occasionally hear laughter or crying or the crack of an open hand connecting with soft flesh. Corporal punishment was the disciplinary tool of preference. I don’t ever remember being grounded or having a privilege taken away. I had none to confiscate.

At times, we kids in the colony all seemed to function as a large, unofficial family. Often we would stop playing to find the closest door and bang on it, begging for water, until someone answered. With a sigh, some unlucky woman would bring out a pitcher and tumbler, which no doubt emptied out her small fridge’s supply for the night, and watch as we all took greedy gulps. In a drought-ridden country like India, it was very bad form to refuse anyone water, and we children knew this. So those who lived on the ground floors of the apartment complexes often became de facto water coolers.

The close proximity in which people lived in India was in stark contrast to my independent existence in America. Here, everyone knew one another’s business, and in general personal space and privacy were ephemeral. For naps, I always chose a spot on the cool green marble floor close to the side of the bed where my grandfather, or KCK as he was called, slept. It was that same spot my grandmother favored in rare moments of quiet. I watched his large, bearlike belly, barely covered by his undershirt, rise and fall. You could time a clock to the sound of his gentle snoring. I’d often wait for the sounds of his waking: the familiar clearing of his throat, a grumble, and a mumble. He’d open one eye, peer down at me, and whisper, so as not to rouse my grandmother, a notoriously light sleeper, still asleep beside him. “Psst, eh, Pads?” he’d say. “There’s a two-rupee note in my bush shirt pocket hanging there. What say you go to All-In-One and grab a little something for you and me?”

The All-In-One was the first store to sprout up among the colony
flats, the Indian version of the many bodegas and Korean delis that define daily life in New York. The All-In-One was the size of a small single-car garage. It sold shaving cream, laundry detergent, plastic wastepaper baskets and buckets for bathing, the disinfectant Dettol, bandages, medicines from Valium to aspirin to asthma inhalers, scissors, paper, pencils, copybooks, savory snacks, chocolates, and Rasna, a powdered drink mix similar to Tang—most of it kept under a glass counter or behind it in a glass cabinet. There were little jars of candies and biscuits and five-paise (about one-twentieth of a rupee) packs of Chiclets. There were two coolers, one for soft-drink bottles and the other, a metal icebox, for Popsicles and ice cream. In the back of the All-In-One, jute sacks of rice, sugar, lentils, coffee, and other raw goods lay heaped behind an iron scale. Two round iron plates hung from the ceiling by chains attached to a bar. The clanging sound the plates made as goods were measured and sold was ear-piercing in intensity. I made anywhere from three to eight trips a day to the All-In-One. I could be dispatched there for oil by my grandmother or for a notebook by Neela, or accompany my uncle Ravi when he was in town and went to buy cigarettes on the sly, bribing me with cold Indian sodas or Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars.

My postnap trips to the store were always clandestine. After instructing me to fish out the rupee notes from his shirt pocket, my grandfather would put a finger to his lips. I knew I had to remove his shirt from the hook by the cupboard without jingling any change that may have been resting in its pockets. I had to take the amount he instructed and slip out of the room. Even if I’d succeeded in not waking my grandmother, I still had to elude inquiries from my busybody aunt Bhanu, who, if not napping in her own room with her daughter, Rajni, would be in the kitchen preparing for five o’clock tea and tiffin.

I never bothered to fish out my
chapals
(slippers) from the shoe closet by the front door, because the sliding wooden doors made too much noise.
And anyway, our whole street was sand. The rest of the neighborhood kids and I played barefoot. But the main road was tarred. At that time of day, with the sun high in the sky and my path baking under the Coromandel heat, walking briskly, let alone casually strolling, would mean second-degree burns. But if I ran as fast as I could, literally hotfooting it, I could just about endure until I reached the cool relief of the All-In-One’s stone floor to complete my task. I was to buy two single-serving vanilla ice cream cups, one for me and one for KCK.

He loved those little cups, each with a wooden spoon taped to the bottom. I usually had enough change to buy myself a small packet of rose mints, Pez-shaped baby-pink candies with a mild but distinct flavor and light floral scent. On the way home I carried the two cups in one hand and the mints and change in the other. I tried to run even faster, because in addition to suffering the scalding tarred road and maintaining the secret of my mission, I had to contend with the melting ice cream. KCK and I ate the cups of ice cream quietly in the bedroom while my grandma slept, beaming at each other between bites, the lovely pain of cold in our mouths.